You’ve made it: your belly is full, and you’re now sitting on the couch with a glass of scotch in hand.

You now have a few hours to kill, so here’s a list of incredible features published this year – on this site and elsewhere – which we think are not to be missed. You will find tales of sorrow and resilience, adventure and injustice. The only thing bringing all these features together? Damn good writing, and damn good storytelling.

The long reads, along with brief descriptions from their publications:

Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, some alone and unseen. Yet death – even in such forlorn form – can cause a surprising amount of activity. Sometimes, along the way, a life’s secrets are revealed

For decades, the freewheeling hippies of Jesus People USA – “God’s forever family” – forged one of the most influential movements in Christianity. They were also Jaime Prater’s family, until he made a documentary exposing the commune’s darkest secrets

Josh Tillman has lived many lives. The singer-songwriter has been a defiant child of God, a broke dishwasher, a successful drummer, a Dionysian shaman, a failed poet. Now, he’s a man with one of the year’s best, most bracing albums

Cid Isbell having a meal at Sol Food restaurant 13 days after his surgery in San Rafael, California. Photograph: Talia Herman for the Guardian

For transgender men, advanced surgical techniques make a functioning penis more attainable than ever. But for Cid Isbell, the desire to look like a man unclothed comes with quandaries of privilege, masculinity and identity

At a group meeting hours later, I told my friends the news. We had two options: I could bow out of the trip entirely, letting the three of them go without me. Or, if they were willing, I could go along, with a lightened pack, leaning heavily on my trekking poles

David Santana and his family recently moved into a more upmarket Orlando trailer park after giving up on their dream of ever owning their own brick and mortar home. Photograph: Mae Ryan for the Guardian

It’s an unusual but potentially lucrative investment: billionaire Warren Buffett is heavily invested, and his and others’ success is prompting ordinary people to attend Mobile Home University, a ‘boot camp’ in trailer park ownership

Over the course of three decades and with 80m records sold, Enya has morphed into more than musician: she’s her own adjective. What makes her music – and the mysterious woman behind it – appealing to so many?

A shredded American flag at a grave site in Blackwater, Arizona. Photograph: Steve Craft for the Guardian

In the Native American community of Blackwater, Arizona, gambling money flows from nearby casinos but personal incomes remain among the lowest in the US. Chris McGreal visits for the last in his series on America’s poorest towns

A man is arrested during protests against the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer, in Ferguson, in August 2014. Photograph: Whitney Curtis/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

After 12 years in the US, Gary Younge is preparing to depart – as the country’s racial frictions seem certain to spark another summer of conflict